Saturday, April 23, 2016

Russia ‘For First Time in Its History’ has Lost Its Monopoly on the Russian Language, Zhadan Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, April 23 – The bilingual
Ukrainian poet Sergey Zhadan, who writes exclusively in Ukrainian, says that
Russia “for the first time in its history has lost the monopoly on its own
language,” a development that many in Russia find hard to accept and that even
more in Ukraine see as a factor in the development of their country.

Aleksey Tsvetkov, a Russian poet,
notes that “more than once” he has heard others say the same thing and that
Zhadan’s observation is important both in explaining Vladimir Putin’s anger and
the implications for Russia of a truly independent Ukraine (inliberty.ru/blog/2303-Komu-prinadlezhit-yazyk).

According to
Tsvetkov, the issue of “who owns the Russian language” has always been resolved
in Russia by silent acquiescence, with most Russians passively assuming that
“the language belonged to the empire and that anyone who uses does so … as it
were by a license extended to him from the center.”

Most empires, the Russian poet
continues, are “in principle multi-lingual; but Russia in this sense is
different from the majority of others” because while it has tolerated
non-Russian languages on the further periphery of its holdings, it has not done
so in the metropolitan center in which Russians believe Ukrainians fit.

Indeed, he argues, “the strategy of
conscious Russification” which took off in the last third of the nineteenth
century “over a comparatively short time achieved unique results: in the
contemporary Russian language, local dialects practically disappeared;” and
hence those who spoke what Russians viewed as variants of Russian were opposed.

“The relation of the average
resident of the Russian metropolitan center to his language was formed by two
main factors: a feeling of the center from which in the view of this resident
this language was legitimately running the language and the absence of
independent [cases] of the use of this language outside [Russia’s] borders.”

According to Tsvetkov, “such a
situation was conceived as completely natural while in fact it was an exception”
to the rules that have governed linguistic development in imperial and especially
post-imperial spaces where people still speak a variant of the language of the former
center but do not feel constrained by its approach.

“British, American, Indian and other
variants can be called dialects only with difficulty. The linguist Max Weinreich
once joked that a language unlike a dialect had its own army and fleet.” But in
fact, this is simply English’s “decentralization,” which has happened with
other imperial languages and is now happening with Russian.

In post-imperial countries where the population
has its own language, the Russian poet continues, it often happens that the imposition
or promotion of that language is at the center of nation building. Russian
paradoxically is doing this even as it has not entirely given up its imperial
past.

Russia’s “status as a nation state is
still doubtful as it has not recovered to this day from its imperial sleep,”
Tsvetkov says; but at the same time, he points out, Russia is pursuing “a
purely nationalistic language policy” and seeking to impose it at home and
abroad by force.

With the rise of Ukraine where many
citizens speak Russian and Russian diasporas further afield, Russia is now
being forced to confront a situation in which it doesn’t have a state monopoly
on the language however much Putin would like to maintain that archaic form.

And this loss in control means, Tsvetkov
says, that “Russian judging from everything will be forced to come to terms
with the fact that it no longer has the right to dictate to the entire world”
how Russian is used or spoken, regardless of what the Kremlin now thinks.